South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic

Journal
13 | 2016
Land, Development and Security in South Asia

The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations

in Contemporary Bangladesh
Shelley Feldman

Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4111
DOI: 10.4000/samaj.4111
ISSN: 1960-6060

Publisher
Association pour la recherche sur l'Asie du Sud (ARAS)

Electronic reference
Shelley Feldman, « The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh »,
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online], 13 | 2016, Online since 08 March 2016,
connection on 19 April 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4111 ; DOI : 10.4000/
samaj.4111

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International License.
 The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh 1

The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and

Land Relations in Contemporary
Bangladesh
Shelley Feldman

Depeasantization and victimization are active

elements in the process of [exclusion,] […] Not only
[are] the Muslim peasants depeasantized,
pauperized and lumpenized on their arrival in
India, the Hindu peasantry of Bangladesh is
cynically and most systematically robbed of land
on communal considerations in the villages of
Bangladesh and this [results in] peasants […]
[being] forced to flee. The catalyst in this case is
the enemy (vested) property laws (Trivedi 2007).

Introduction
1 In this paper, I argue that the Enemy or Vested Property Act (VPA)1 and its multiple
reforms provide a window into on the construction of Hindu citizens of Bangladesh as
Other. I draw particular attention to the regimes in power since 1971 for what they reveal
about the reproduction of a minority population, since the country is premised on
democratic principles of equality among citizens. In so doing, I expose the paradox that
resides in the relationship between the genocidal struggle for independence and
secularism and a presumed ethnic, rather than religious, basis for belonging. I suggest
that the construction of Hindus as the other legitimates state appropriations2 of their
property and, by challenging their rights to land ownership as a right of all citizens,
constructs Hindus as a threat to national security. This construction legitimates land
appropriation in the interest of state needs, as well as for private accumulation. It finds a
parallel in Ayesha Jalal’s suggestion of a significant feature legitimating the offensive
position of Pakistan during the independence struggle: ‘If Hindu India is the enemy

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 The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh 2

without, the proponents of regional autonomy alongside the ungodly secularists3 are the
enemies within’ (Jalal 1995: 82).
2 To explore these themes, I draw on interviews conducted during three periods of
fieldwork, in 2013 in Rajshahi, a northern district of Bangladesh, and in 2014 in Dhaka, as
well as over the course of numerous field trips in Bangladesh during earlier stays in the
country. I also draw on lengthy discussions with a key informant, a scholar from
Bangladesh temporarily in the U.S. Finally, the argument builds on cases examined from
the Dacca (subsequently Dhaka) Law Review, 1960–2011, although it does not focus on
particular cases, and an exploration of newspaper reports that are critical for signalling
recent public expressions of violence against Hindus. The discussion unfolds first by
examining land appropriation as a relation of subjection. This is followed by an
examination of the making of majoritarian rule, both before and after independence,
including a focus on the current conjuncture about what it portends for property
relations and the differential rights of Bangladeshi citizens. The principal purpose of the
paper, however, is not to offer new evidence on land appropriation. Rather, I provide a
new interpretation of extant evidence, one that moves from structuralist accounts that
contribute to our understanding of accumulation practices, to an argument for the
inseparability of accumulation practices in/as a relation of rule and subjection. In other
words, I argue that distinct from studies that view subjection as a response to structural
and political change, these processes are relational and co-constitutive. I also show that
marking people as the other from whom property appropriations could be justified was
not an outcome of a single policy, fixed once and for all, but, instead, a set of ongoing and
contradictory policy reforms and practices that reproduce both difference and
majoritarian rule.

Land appropriation as a relation of subjection

3 Debates focused on land grabbing, including both large-scale appropriations by
governments as well as everyday takings from small producers, have renewed interest in
Marx’s conception of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ understood as the enclosure of
private land holdings and the separation of direct producers from their means of
subsistence and production.4 These debates have opened to scrutiny the character of
accumulation processes, as well as their costs for particular constituencies who are most
often the poor and unprotected. The basis of these debates is Marx’s understanding of
primitive accumulation that transforms ‘the social means of subsistence and of
production into capital [and] the immediate producers into wage labourers’ (Marx 1983:
668).
4 Crucially, Marx presupposes ‘the complete separation of labourers from all property in
the means by which they can realize their labour’ as the basis of capitalism. Debate
continues, however, as to whether this separation or ‘historical premise’ refers solely to
the original appropriation or to an ongoing process of social transformation. As Marx
maintains:
As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this
separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale. The process,
therefore, that clears the way for capitalist production, can be none other than the
process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of
production (Marx 1983: 668, emphasis added).

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 The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh 3

5 Two points are significant for the discussion to follow. One is that the appropriation of
land is central to the reorganization of capitalist agriculture and, hence, to processes of
accumulation. This builds on the assumption that meeting the world’s food needs
requires increasingly large-scale commercial agricultural production that can no longer
be accommodated under the mix of large, medium, subsistence, and under-subsistence
producers. This assumption, and declining support for small-scale agricultural producers,
sets the conditions for the consolidation of landholdings. This assumption is part of a
neoliberal development strategy that supports investment in non-farm work, credit, and
micro-enterprise development under the premise that wage labour is better able than
agriculture to meet the reproduction needs of small-scale producers.5 Second, and
following from the separation of people from their productive resources, is the need to
continually reproduce this separation through both direct and indirect property
appropriations. Together, these processes enable ongoing, if historically contingent,
relations of accumulation. Further, tethering land appropriation and the
commodification of labour power produces particular subjectivities, since how people
make a life through work and social reproduction casts them in relation to each other, to
their communities as sites marked by specific senses of security and responsibility, and to
the constitution of a national imaginary that shapes identification, identity, and
belonging.6
6 Following S. Charusheela (2011: 323), I engage the connection between land appropriation
and the violent establishment ‘of the conditions for the subjugation and subjective
emergence of the wage labourer’, a relation that is particularly suggestive in examining
contemporary land relations in Bangladesh, with three critical qualifications. First, unlike
the need to release labour to support a large and emergent labour market that explained
the first so-called primitive accumulation, today the expropriation of people from their
property ‘release[s] a set of assets (including labour power) at very low (and in some
instances zero) cost. Over-accumulated capital can seize hold of such assets and
immediately turn them to profitable use’ (Harvey 2003: 149). This expropriation, often by
private capital, has transformed the landscape in the areas around Bangladeshi cities,
particularly Dhaka, as agricultural land becomes the ground for both industrial
production and residential communities. Under eminent domain, the state has also seized
large tracts of peri-urban land for military housing.
7 A second qualification of Charusheela’s contribution concerns the people from whom
private property can be confiscated. To be sure, the category of the poor is highly
differentiated in ways that lead one to ask: From whom, among the vulnerable, can land
or property grabs be legitimated without sparking broad-based reprisal? What context
shapes identification of this constituency, and precisely how are property and resource
grabs justified and enacted based upon the specificity of a group’s identity? These
questions raise the third qualification of Charusheela’s suggestive intervention, the
importance of understanding relations of rule and the constitutive character of
belonging, identification, and national identity for policy reform. Focusing on this
constitutive process draws attention to how institutional, bureaucratic, and governance
practices shape the ways in which rule is enacted. It also draws attention to how building
legitimacy, as the substance of rulemaking, aids in establishing who belongs and who is
marginalized or excluded, who has rights, and whose rights can be compromised without
fear of public outrage. Included in this process is what Philip Abrams (1988: 61)
understands as the building of hegemony, constituted by institutional and discursive

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 The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh 4

practices that are often enshrined in law, embedded in the ‘public aspects of politics’
(Abrams 188: 61), and routinized in symbolic gestures and moral judgments. These
processes provide the ground for patterns of social inclusion/exclusion,7 ethnicization, 8
and minoritization,9 which produce communities in a hierarchy of economic and social
security positioned in relation to their rights and ability to demand legal accountability.
8 In examining these relations of othering, I ask the following questions: How do the social
relations that embody land and property appropriations, notorious for their enactment
through ‘conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, and in short, force, [which] plays the
greatest part’ (Marx 1983: 668), help to create particular kinds of subjects? What role does
policy and governance, including claims of national interest and security play in
legitimating land appropriation? What, for example, is the role of bureaucratic elites in
facilitating and securing land grabs through violent, as well as non-violent, means?
Finally, how do rhetorics of othering secure the legitimacy of dispossession among
minority populations? Responses to these questions will expose the mutually constitutive
character of relations of accumulation and subjection.
9 As a predatory political formation, Bangladesh’s so-called democracy includes universal
suffrage and free and fair elections. As popularly understood, however, the political
process consists of competition over which party will benefit from the ‘unethical but,
nevertheless, socially accepted’ struggle over state resources and privileges, including
exploitation of the environment and extractive and natural resources (Pertev 2009: 9). A
variant of crony capitalism, these predations entail illegal appropriations that further the
control and concentration of scarce resources that can be leveraged for state patronage,
as well as for private gain. But importantly, such appropriations are not usually directed
at an undifferentiated vulnerable population. Rather, such seizures target particular
populations through practices that are legitimated in state rule. This is precisely the case
in Bangladesh, where Hindu citizens have been subjected to property appropriations
legitimized by the Enemy/Vested Property Act, established specifically to justify land
enclosures of their property. The result is the constitution of forms of rule and subjection
that are best understood as both the process and product of the construction of the Hindu
as other.

The Vested Property Act (VPA) and the making of

majoritarian rule: the East Pakistan period
10 Following the 1947 partition of India into the predominantly Muslim state of Pakistan,
including its East and West Wings, and the Hindu majority state of India, Mohammad Ali
Jinnah, the founder and first governor general of Pakistan, initially repudiated the
theocratic foundations of the Pakistani state, noting that, ‘You may belong to any religion
or caste or creed. That has nothing to do with the business of the state. We are starting
with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of the state’
(Jinnah 2004). But despite this proclamation, he soon thereafter attempted to build a
nationalist project in an idiom of a shared Urdu language, ostensibly to create a sense of
collective belonging that would bring the East and West Wings together. The argument
against Bengali, and for Urdu, was that Bengali did not comport with the construction of
a national narrative articulated in the sacralized language and cultural traditions of
Islam. At this time, the Hindu population was estimated to be between 10 and 12 million
with Muslims accounting for 32 million (Lambert 1950, Schechtman 1951). Thus,

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 The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh 5

introducing Urdu as the lingua franca was a response to the perceived threat of Bengali
nationalism in the East, where Bengali language and culture were infused with Hindu
religious and linguistic idioms, and a significant proportion of the population was Hindu.
This language initiative can thus be understood as an effort to mark Hindus as a
community distinct from East Bengal’s Muslim majority.
11 In addition to the 1948 struggle against Urdu, the 1949 effort to introduce the Arabic
script instead of the Sanskritized Devanagari Bengali script, led to the Language
Movement—bhasha andolan—in East Pakistan. The Movement sought recognition of the
East as a multi-religious community whose mark of national belonging was shared
language rather than religious identity.10,11 A bloody battle ensued following a five-year
struggle against the imposition of Urdu as the lingua franca. A number of university
students were killed and today, for many Bengalis, Hindus and Muslims alike, Ekushy, 21
February, remains a hallmark of national pride.
12 Struggles over recognition of the multiethnic character of East Pakistan, and the
particular place of Hindus in the body politic, also included the State’s proposal for a
separate electorate for minorities. But Bengali Muslims and Hindus alike rejected this
proposal, even as a 1956 Constitutional provision only allowed Muslims to serve as the
president of Pakistan. Arguing against the proposal were Basant Kumar Das, Peter Paul
Gomez and B.K. Dutta, as well as H.S. Suhrawardy and Mujib-ur-Rahman,12 all members of
the Constituent Assembly that included Hindus, Christians, and Muslims. They claimed
that the proposal would relegate minorities to the status of second-class citizens and,
significantly, would put Muslims residing in India at risk, since the politics of the period
reflected an implicit or explicit engagement with policies in India.
13 Passage of The East Bengal (Emergency) Requisition of Property Act (XIII of 1948) 13 was
Jinnah’s final action aimed at marking Hindus as second-class citizens. The Act
empowered the government to ‘acquire, either on a temporary or permanent basis, any
property it considered needful for the administration of the state’ (Barkat et al. 1997: 27).
Although claimed to be necessary to meet the administrative needs of the newly
independent province, including the need to accommodate government offices and civil
servants, it also obfuscated illegal appropriations, particularly of Hindus (Mohsin 2004).
According to Lambert (1950), ‘80 percent of the urban property in East Bengal was in the
hands of Hindus’, as were large estates. The value of real property and other assets
assumed abandoned in East Pakistan ‘was officially estimated by the Chief Minister of
West Bengal at 870 million rupees (US$ 182,700,000)’ (Schechtman 1951: 412). Such
unequal ownership of property helped to publically justify state confiscations without
compensation.
14 Thus, in theory, the agreement signed by Prime Ministers Liaquat Ali Khan of Pakistan,
and Jawaharlal Nehru of India on 10 April 1950, provided a hopeful sign for migrants, as it
acknowledged that refugees would be permitted to take with them their movable
personal effects, including up to 150 rupees. It further acknowledged that immovable
property would not be confiscated, even if occupied by another person, if its owner
returned to East Pakistan before the end of 1950. If, however, landowners chose not to
return, they were free to either sell or exchange their property (Schechtman 1951: 412).
Significantly, the agreement promised that ‘[r]ent or compensation for requisitioned
property was to be promptly assessed and paid over to the owner’ (Schechtman 1951:
412). In practice, however, these Acts instead dispossessed Hindus who opted for Pakistan

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 The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh 6

and instantiated a long, and still ongoing, process that reproduced religious difference as
central to the project of Pakistani state- and nation-making.
15 The India-Pakistan War in 1965 also legitimated relations of Hindu othering by providing
the state with an opportunity to reiterate the criticality of Muslim unity in Pakistan and
to mark Hindus as potential threats to this unity. This short war also legitimated
President Ayub Khan’s passing of Order XXIII of 1965, The Defense of Pakistan Ordinance,
declaring India an enemy country and authorizing the confiscation of all interests of the
enemy.14 This ‘undisguised act of retaliation’, (Benkin 2009: 79) included taking
possession of property from those who were citizens of India but also citizens of
territories in which Hindus, now proclaimed as the enemy, resided, occupied, controlled,
or were captured. The conflation of India with all Hindus in undivided India justified
Ayub Khan’s passage of the Ordinance with the Enemy Property (Custody and
Registration) Order of 1965 and 1966, and the East Pakistan Enemy Property (Lands and
Buildings) Administration and Disposal Order, 1966, under Rule 182 (1) of the Defense of
Pakistan Rule. Together, both Ordinances reconfirmed in law the Hindu as other, thus
framing the national narrative in an idiom of Islam.
16 Despite revoking the state of emergency on 16 February 1969, The Defense of Pakistan
Rules relating to the control of trade with the enemy and their firms continued, as did use
of the term ‘enemy’. This continuance empowered the District Commissioners, who held
bureaucratic control in the rural areas, to implement these ordinances and rules under
the Government’s declaration of the Enemy Property, Continuance of Emergency
Provisions Ordinance, 1969 (Ordinance I of 1969), even in the absence of war (Barkat et al.
2008).
17 Shrouded in claims of national security, together these orders imposed draconian rules
aimed at Hindu landowners and those owning firms and buildings that sanctioned
property acquisition by the state (Shafi 2007, Mohsin 2004). The enemy, couched in an
idiom of state security, included all Hindus who resided in India, even if they had family
or kin in Pakistan and who, according to Hindu inheritance law, could be the recipients of
their property (Barkat et al. 1997). Thus, declaring India an enemy state meant that even
Hindus living in East Pakistan were included among those whose allegiance was suspect
and assumed to be inevitably tied to India. It led, as well, to a second major displacement,
since Hindus were now deprived of their rights to property and to its transfer, sale, and
gifting.
18 Despite these takings, Hindus continued to opt for East Pakistan as their country of
belonging, a choice that valorized its syncretic tradition, language, and the identification
of the majority of its inhabitants as Bengali rather than Muslim. Those Hindus remaining
in the East, however, challenged the leadership in the West, who feared their potential
electoral power and their progressive orientation, and viewed their decision as a threat to
national security. These challenges eventually helped catalyse the West Pakistan response
to the East Wing’s call for autonomy—the threat of Bengali nationalism and a
questionable identification with Islam, stemming, in some measure, from the haunting
success of the Language Movement and the struggle against Urdu as the national
language.

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 The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh 7

Reproducing majoritarian rule: the politics of

independence
19 Paradoxically, recognizing the syncretism that defined what was distinctive about Bengali
cultural practices provided not only a marked other for the West but also the grounds for
the secular demands that would shape the movement for an independent Bangladesh.
This claim acknowledges that, following the Indo-Pakistan war, there was a growing
demand for political and economic autonomy of the East Wing. This was especially so
following Army Chief Yahya Khan’s passing of the Enemy Property (Continuance of
Emergency Provision) Ordinance in 1969, which, by declaring martial law, annulled the
Constitution that recognized the fundamental right to ‘profess any religion’. This
militarization of the region sustained state efforts to eliminate from the East any
association with the region’s Hindu past and to control progressive elements that sought
regional autonomy. Notable here is not only Khan’s refusal to address Sheik Mujibur
Rahman’s initial demand for the autonomy of East Pakistan—and, eventually, an
independent Bangladesh—but also his ordering of military intervention to suppress the
Awami League, as well as to curtail political mobilization. Rather than negotiate for
autonomy, the military entered East Pakistan, targeting Hindus and progressive forces in
one of the most brutal genocides in world history.
20 Hindu faculty at Dhaka University were among the first assassinated by the Pakistan
army during Operation Searchlight on 26 March 1971, as they, and other progressive
faculty, were assumed to have instigated the movement for autonomy. The military was
particularly hostile to Hindus—who, they believed, ‘played a malevolent role in East
Bengal’,—given their assumption that Hindus were ‘natural’ inhabitants of India and,
thus, were intent on either exterminating or driving them out of the country (Beachler
2007: 467). As van Schendel (2009: 162) wrote:
In these first gruesome hours of army terror, people all over Dhaka were picked up
from their homes and ‘dispatched to Bangladesh’—the army’s euphemism for
summary execution. There were verbal and later written orders to shoot Hindu
citizens. Dhaka’s old artisan neighborhood of Shankharipotti […] was attacked and
Hindu inhabitants murdered. Many prominent Hindus were sought out and put to
death.
21 US Senator Edward Kennedy likewise remarked about the targeting of Hindus during the
independence war:
Field reports to the US Government, countless eye-witnesses, journalistic accounts,
reports of international agencies […] document the reign of terror which grips East
Bengal (East Pakistan). Hardest hit have been members of the Hindu community
who have been robbed of their lands and shops, systematically slaughtered, and in
some cases, painted with yellow patches marked ‘H’. All of this has been officially
sanctioned, ordered and implemented under martial law from Islamabad (Lintner
2003: 2).
22 The result of this reign of terror was another mass migration of Hindu East Pakistanis to
India, signaling the complex identifications shaping the lives of those who chose to
remain in the country.15
23 This targeting of Hindus institutionalized the right to violence that can turn neighbors
into enemies and people to be feared for the threat they pose to conceptions of national
belonging. It also can destroy community and forms of sociality that make such behavior

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 The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh 8

against kin or neighbor possible. Paradoxically, this construction of the Hindu as other
became most evident when, on 10 April 1971, after declaring liberation on 26 March 1971
following a nine month bloody struggle, the provisional government, under the Vice
President and Acting President Syed Nazrul Islam, ordered that all laws in force on 25
March would continue. This included the Laws of Continuance Enforcement Order, 1971,
which retained those same laws regarding enemy property that were promulgated prior
to Independence. The following year, on 4 November 1972, the Bangladesh Parliament
adopted the independence principles of nationalism, socialism, democracy, and
secularism, but also The Bangladesh (Vesting of Property and Assets) Order which
recognized the new government as vested with ‘enemy’ properties seized since the 1965
War and stipulated that its provisions shall not be subjected to judicial review.
Consequently, land owned by Hindus, their legal heirs, or family members currently
residing on the property, was subject to dispossession, including by force.16 The Order
also led to illegal appropriations as government officials were given the power to
arbitrarily designate land as enemy property, thus undermining the ownership rights of
Hindus as citizens, as well as their rights to state protection.
24 Later, in 1975, and following the murder of Sheik Mujibir Rahman, popularly known as
Bangabandhu (Friend of Bengal) and the founding father of Bangladesh, religious and
ethnic identities were again challenged, especially by Bangladeshi nationalism which
accompanied the ascendency of the military regimes of Zia Rahman (1975–1981) and
Hossain Mohammad Ershad (1981–1990). Bangladeshi nationalism was a project aimed at
purging Hindu idioms from Bengali national identification in efforts to distance the
country’s cultural landscape from both the Awami League and (Hindu) West Bengal.
Crucially, it answered the national identity question by reframing ‘we are Bengali first
and Muslim second’ as ‘we are Muslims first and Bengalis second’, recasting national
belonging from an ethnic identification with Hindu West Bengal, India, to a religious
identification with Pakistan. Unsurprisingly, this shift also recognized Islamist interests
and political party participation, particularly of the Jaamat-i-Islami, thereby
compromising the secular principle of independence. The change led first, in 1977, to the
deletion from the Constitution of secularism as a state principle and, second, in 1988, to
the declaration of Islam as the state religion. At play during the shift from Bengali to
Bangladeshi nationalism was a rhetoric that emphasized the specter of caste Hindu
domination, the tensions of partition, and the communal violence that shaped political
rule in what was characterized as Hindu India (Chowdhury 2009).
25 The reproduction of Hindus as other was thus further entrenched by practices of cultural
and social enclosure, including when, under military rule, Muslim prayer before public
meetings and on television, was first promoted and then required; and again, in 1979,
when Zia Rahman added ‘Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim’ before the Preamble of the
Constitution and replaced the words ‘historic struggle for national liberation’ with
‘historic war for national independence’. This latter move signals the shift from a
liberation struggle to a nationalist project to claim sovereignty and safeguard Bangladesh
from her foreign enemy, India. These changes reflected Zia’s effort to elide connections
between the liberation movement and those of the 1952 Language Movement that
recognized struggles for a shared Bengali culture against an Urdu dominated Islamic one.
To accomplish this shift, he introduced ‘Islamiyat’ (Islamic religious study) as compulsory
from Class I-VIII, giving minority students the option of taking similar religious courses
(Samad 1998) and requiring school instruction in vernacular Bangla, including at the

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 The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh 9

university, as a way to encourage identification with Islam and Pakistan (Guhathakurta

2002). Critical to his state-making project was Zia’s distinction between Bengali and
Bangladeshi identity, which not only marked Hindu Bengalis and Bangladeshis as
dissimilar, but also gave credence to the sense that all Hindus, those in India as well as
Hindu Bengali citizens of Bangladesh, were always potential enemies of the state. Such
practices reignited insecurity and fear in the everyday lives of minority populations,
while also encouraging the temporary and permanent migration of Hindus to India.

Contingencies of ownership and the politics of

difference under democratic rule
26 Expectations changed with the public uprising against the autocratic regime of General
Ershad that led, in 1991, to the first democratic elections that brought Khaleda Zia and
the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) to power. Their alliance with the Jamaat-i-Islami
made the victory of the BNP possible and raised, again, the specter of Islam as a defining
feature of the ruling project. Ali Riaz (2003) suggests that the turn to Jamaat occurred
precisely because the two leading political parties failed to secure hegemonic rule and,
thus, allied with Jamaat simply for electoral expediency. Claims of expediency
notwithstanding, such alliances have long-term consequences that build on Jamaat’s
institutionalization during military rule and continue as part of a process of Islamization
that threatens the security of minority populations. Meghna Guhathakurta (2012)
acknowledges this threat as contributing to a growing sense of alienation, while Abul
Barkat and his coauthors (2008) show that it led to ongoing Hindu forced, or ‘last resort’,
migration.
27 Sheikh Hasina’s ascendency to power in 1996 led to passage of the Restoration of Vested
Property Act, 2001 (Act No. 16 of 2001) which stipulated that previously confiscated lands
should be returned to their original Hindu owners. However, the Act referred only to
properties vested prior to February 1969, while ignoring properties confiscated
afterwards that were likely in the hands of government officials or miscreants, and often
confiscated illegally. It also excluded land that was no longer in government hands or
currently used by or leased to an authorized person. Thus, despite this initial sense of
promise, these and other restrictions of the Act failed to offer claimants access to the
return of land that they or their families owned.
28 Khaleda Zia’s return to power further diluted the Restoration Act by removing time limits
on the government’s responsibility to enforce the return of property. Emphasizing the
role of political power in illegal land appropriations, Barkat (2000) calculates that 44.2
percent of vested property was appropriated by members of the AL, 31.7 percent by the
BNP, 5.8 percent by Ershad’s Jatiya Party, 4.8 percent by Jamaat-e-Islami, and 13.5 percent
by others. And, under BNP rule (2001 to 2006) an additional eight percent of the incidents
of land encroachment were added to the more than 2 million acres of land, or 45 percent
of all land owned by Hindus taken before this period (ASK 2006).
29 Also consequential for the social and economic security of Bangladeshi Hindus are
communal relations in India. For example, soon after the elections, the country witnessed
the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid by Hindu fundamentalists that led to the death of
more than 2000 people, not only in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, but also in a number of cities
across the country. The Gujarat riots that followed a decade later, in 2002, resulted in the

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 The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh 10

death of more than 2000 Muslims and displaced hundreds more. In each case, there were
retaliatory attacks on Hindu people and property in Bangladesh with little government
intervention to stop them, which further deprived Hindus of a sense of social security and
access to adjudication.
30 The result of such failures of government has been a growing sense of alienation among
those against whom violence can be justified by routine practices of rule that reflexively
render them different, unworthy, and devalued. Such practices recall women who met
the wrath of witch-hunters as they resisted usurpations in their struggle for more
egalitarian gender relations, leading to, among other acts of violence, ‘the murder of the
accused and the confiscation of their properties’ (Federici 2008: 21). Reproducing such
difference, in other words, is a process of ongoing social enclosure—othering, devaluation,
and exclusion—that entail public discourse that constructs the other as enemy and makes
subjects of presumed citizens. Critical to this account are the claims that such
appropriations are carried out in the name of protecting the Muslim majority and
securing their rights as citizens of the state.
31 Such practices build on demonizing narratives against Hindus that once initiated gain
currency as they circulate in the press, in literature, and in memoirs, as well as in private
discussion and rumor within families and communities (Guhathakurta 2012). They are
materialized in state policies that construct difference and justify differential state action
that gradually alienates, marginalizes, and discriminates against Hindus. But,
importantly, they include reluctance amongst Hindus to adjudicate or claim ownership
rights because they fear retribution. Further, even among those with the social networks
and financial resources to fight for control of their property, fear, angst, and disrespect
shape processes of adjudication. Arild Ruud (1996) suggests that such practices can lead
personnel, acting on behalf of state institutions, to refuse or fail to safeguard members of
the Hindu community by ignoring illegal practices, including violence committed against
them, or to defer responsibility when requests for fairness or recompense have been
made. Benkin (2009: 80) suggests these actions can lead to legalized oppression, even
ethnic cleansing. Another way to make the same point, indicating the recursive character
of policy reforms and subjection, is that the Hindu minority community in majoritarian
Bangladesh is deemed to require destruction of their power through ‘extermination’, an
experience that also characterizes relations in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (Federici 2004:
63, Introduction to this volume).
32 Importantly, these relations of social enclosure and, in the extreme, extermination, both
accompany and justify forms of expropriation that recast social life, turning peasants into
proletarians or worse, since today, processes of land appropriation go hand-in-hand with
the withdrawal of state support for the rural poor. For all Hindus, but particularly the
land-poor, this leads to lives that are increasingly precarious, as usurpation through legal
and contractual transgressions are secured, as a matter of state, in a context that includes
the privatization of public resources and market-driven solutions to social issues.
Differential access to new resources can be legitimated on the basis of Hindu difference/
enmity and claimed in the name of national security. Finally, in struggles over land claims
and illegal expropriations by government personnel, aligning the management of vested
property claims with primarily rural and town administrators turns a blind eye to the
state’s complicity with elite expropriators in ways that further limit the possibilities for
redress.

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 The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh 11

The current conjuncture: amending the VPA

33 The return to power of the AL, following the Caretaker government (2006–2008), again led
to rising expectations among those seeking redress for the VPA. On 6 November 2008, the
High Court division of the Supreme Court challenged the Enemy Property (Continuance of
Emergency Provision) (Repeal) Act of 1974, arguing that it contradicts the fundamental
rights and charter of the Bangladesh Declaration of Independence. The Government
followed with the Vested Property Repeal (Amendment) Act, 2011, which was amended
again in 2012 and 2013.17 Each of these amended Acts raised expectations among
Bangladeshi Hindu citizens, even as pre-election violence in 2013, including demolition of
Hindu temples and failure of the government to protect those targeted, dashed their
hopes for redress.
34 But this time, frustration with the failure of the AL to implement the return of seized
property led to a critical public discussion organized by nine rights organizations and
citizen groups18 which argued that the amended Vested Property Repeal (Amendment)
Act of 2013 ‘is part of a plot by corrupt land officials to prolong the return of “vested
property”’.19Under current law, not only do ‘corrupt officials’ illegally enlist land as
vested property, but they also publish gazettes on newly identified lands that create
opportunities for the continual harassment of Hindu landowners by district officers.
Moreover, Subrata Chowdhury of Arpito Sampatti Ain Protirodh Andolon (ASAPA)
suggests that the move to allow the publication of supplementary gazettes, expand the
list of properties, and extend ‘the timeline for publishing the supplementary gazettes is
an attempt to prolong the crisis of vested property laws in a new form’ (Jahangir 2013).
35 Identifying the complicity of ‘corrupt officials’ was a central concern. As Kazal Debnath of
the Bangladesh Hindu Buddha Christian Oikya Parishad (HBCOP) makes evident, each of
the 16 or 17 documents required under the law to file a complaint entail bribes to
officials. Barkat et al. (2008) similarly argued in reference to an earlier period that ‘the
notorious ordinance of 1965 began the vesting of property of religious minorities who
were temporarily forced out of the country, but corrupt land officials benefit from
refusing to enforce the Supreme Court verdict of 23 March 1974 that declared the Enemy
Property Order 1965 dead’ (Guhathakurta 2002: 82). The new amendment similarly
advantages land officials who have been involved in vesting for a long period, allowing
them 300 more days to list vested properties while offering the plaintiffs only 30 days to
file their complaints (Jahangir 2013).
36 Sadly, but unsurprisingly, the amended Act has yet to be implemented, further
contributing to Hindu insecurity and affecting forms of adaptation and avoidance,
including everyday linguistic choices that people make when in public. As Guhathakurta
explains, ‘Muslim terminology [is often chosen] […] in order to disguise their (Hindu)
difference of identity in public; either to cause less hassle or simply to avoid eyebrows
being raised’ (2002: 82). Such relations of sociality are constitutive of the vulnerabilities of
those who are likely to fall prey to potential land expropriation and the poor who fear
reprisal should they complain or challenge the behavior of Muslim elites or government
officials.
37 Middle class Hindus express similar feelings of vulnerability, although they are more
likely to assert their rights and use legal resources to secure family property. As one key
middle class informant lamented, ‘I have the resources and the connections to fight for

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 The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh 12

my property, but it takes a lot of money and connections to do so… we always have to
worry… we don’t often win’ (Feldman 2014). Thus, despite their status as members of the
middle class, living with the continual threat of land grabbing means that many Hindus
choose not to seek redress:
This is the story of 23 acres of land in Faridpur District: The original owners went to
India during the Indo-Pak War, the land was recorded as vested property but was
actually taken by three men, Khaleque, Rashid, and Hakim. Khaleque ‘prepared’
false documents for part of the land, ignoring the fact that vested property cannot
be sold, and subsequently sold a portion of it to Muktar and Ismail. Ismail sold ‘his’
land to Hafizur. Yet, what is also clear is that a nephew of the original owner still
resides in the area, a 50-year-old village physician (Feldman 2014).
38 While this window on the social life of land ownership illuminates the violence and illegal
transfers associated with the VPA, it fails to address what these processes mean for Hindu
owners. In this case, Mr. Das does not have living relatives in the area; nor did his uncle
formally transfer the land to him or his family. However, any legal successor to the real
owner is eligible to petition for the property if they can produce a legal succession
certificate. Yet, as a man of some means, he has not petitioned for his land and makes
plain why he has not done so: ‘The court may issue an order in favour of me, but if I
would like to take possession, they (those currently on the land) will kill me. Moreover, I
[…] am in doubt whether I would be able to secure my own properties from the grabbers’
(Feldman 2013). This and numerous similar stories reveal the costs of being a Bangladeshi
Hindu, particularly regarding everyday social behavior and access to resources and
rights.
39 In other instances, a person’s village status changes when their land is vested. To
summarize a finding from Barkat et al. (2008: 133–37): As a school teacher, Mr. Debnath
was a respected member of the local School Managing Committee, the local Puja
Committee, the shalish (local village court), and regularly contributed to community
ceremonies. However, his financial security deteriorated when he brought a legal suit
against Abdul Aziz and Kalipad Ghoshal, who had grabbed his agricultural land. He first
discovered that someone had claimed his property when he visited the tehsil office to pay
his taxes and was told the land was recorded in the name of two others. After working
with the Deputy Commissioner, he was informed that the title would be reissued in his
name, but, when he went to harvest his crop, a violent exchange ensued with Aziz’s gang.
A shalish followed only to confirm that the land belonged to Aziz, a prominent BNP
businessman in the community.
40 In addition to revealing the Bangladeshi Hindu’s own cautious behavior and routine
disrespect from others, Barkat et al. (2008) show how usurpers both threaten Hindu
landowners with eviction and harass young girls (‘eve-teasing’) in ways that lead families
to stop sending girls to school simply to avoid harassment. Others note that in some
communities, every male has been beaten at least once. But, as community members
argue, most disturbing is the lack of response to such acts of violence by authorities who
implicitly condone continued attacks and harassment. As Shuruz (2004) similarly notes,
the desperation of a Gopalpur villager is evident as she recounts that the brutality of
crimes committed this year was greater than the brutality committed by this same group
in last year’s attack: ‘In the past, women were spared, but now some are even forcefully
disrobed… Yet no officer from the police station or administration […] showed up to
‘assure our security’, except after the news of it hit the press that the apathetic
administration received a stirring.’ Another villager recalls how, after the demolition of

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 The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh 13

the Babri Mosque in India, a different cremation ground was usurped by this same group:
‘It is a vicious, manmade cycle.’ These experiences highlight the reproduction of senses of
insecurity and fear in a context where perpetrators of local, community-based tensions,
threats, and outbursts against Hindus do not face government redress and, in some
instances, even have their actions condoned by state authorities.
41 In a final example, Mr. Das, a Hindu and member of the Land Ministry who accompanied
me on a drive to a peri-urban area of Dhaka, made quite evident that the region, once the
vegetable basket of the city, was now a major site for industrial and export production.
On the drive, I queried Mr. Das about the dramatic transformation of this once rural
countryside. But, he met every effort I made to casually discuss this dramatic change in
the landscape with a variant of ‘I cannot really discuss land matters since they are a
matter of national security.’ And when, over tea, and in the company of an Upazilla
officer, I shared my experience of having been in the area 15 years earlier, and now was
surprized at how quickly Bangladesh was being urbanized, Mr. Das quickly intervened,
making it clear that his junior officer was not permitted to comment. Even when talking
about the recent amendments to the Vested Property Act, and whether and how it was
affecting his office—more work and a backlog of cases—Mr. Das quickly cut the
conversation short, saying that they had no information, since the gazetteers listing
vested properties had yet to be released. In sharing my experience with other
researchers, policy makers, and NGO members, my interpretation of the lack of
transparency and obfuscation on the part of government representatives was confirmed
(Feldman 2013).
42 As land seizures continue, including the taking of buildings located in provincial towns
where they are increasingly valued, even those with resources and connections to top-
level administrators may be unable to ward off property grabs. Under these conditions,
and without holding accountable those who use their power and are complicit in land
grabbing, there is little guarantee that Hindu owners will ever be able to secure their
rights to property and full citizenship. What these examples also show is that
dispossession depends on the expropriation of property, the governance structures that
legitimate the practice, and the constitution of fear among those who might have legal
claims to the property. One can only wonder whether the tease of policy change, and
accompanying claims of opportunities for redress, will actually be able to deliver on the
promise to stop illegal land grabbing. And one can only wonder if patterns of othering,
engendering fear among Hindus marked as threats to national security, will also be
undermined, particularly under current regimes that claim to be, and are recognized
internationally as, democratic formations.

Conclusion
43 In this paper, I have sought to explain the loss of as much as 75 percent of religious
minority property confiscated and justified under the VPA (Choudhury 2009). Not only
did the Pakistani state claim rights to Hindu land for government and public use prior to
Independence, but the most concentrated appropriations, often taken illegally, occurred
immediately following independence during the first AL and BNP governments (1972–
1975; 1976–1980) (Choudhury 2009). These expropriations were followed by a period of
unregulated land grabs during continued military rule (1980–1990) and, again, under the
democratically elected formations of the Bangladesh National Party (1991–1996; 2006–

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 The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh 14

2008) and the Awami League (1996–2000; 2009–2013; 2014–). Despite these appropriations,
aspirations for Hindu recognition, under Sheik Hasina and the AL, and fear of Hindu
hostility under Khaleda Zia and the BNP, characterize the experiences of Hindu citizens.
The fear of retribution by Hindu property owners, and the class and regional dispersion
of the Hindu population have contributed to limited resistance but also to a sense that
survival may sometimes depend on hiding one’s sense of self. In Arjun Appadurai’s words,
identifications can become
unstable, indeterminate, and socially volatile, [and] a means of satisfying one’s
sense of one’s categorical self. […] Uncertainty about identification and violence can
lead to actions, reactions, complicities, and anticipations that multiply the pre-
existing uncertainty about labels. Together, these forms of uncertainty call for the
worst kind of certainty: dead certainty (Appadurai 1998: 922–23).
44 I have argued that focusing on the Vested Property Act and its various iterations offers an
optic through which to explain relations of dispossession and subjection that
simultaneously constitute the logic and the institutionalization of the Act. In so doing, I
offer four critical interventions to contemporary discussions of land grabbing. First is the
need to explore further everyday forms of expropriation as constitutive of contemporary
neoliberal practice. By exploring neoliberal practice, I emphasize the continued
valorization of accumulation for some, on the one hand, and wage labour, rather than
subsistence production, on the other. To realize processes of accumulation, I lend support
to what Gardner and Gerharz (Introduction to this volume) refer to as ‘crony capitalism’,
a form of hyper development enabled by the state’s neoliberal ‘open door’ policies.
Second, I argue that the material and structural aspects of land grabbing should be
understood as mutually constitutive processes that depend on both cultural enclosures
and relations of subjection. This means that cultural enclosures and relations of
subjection are not merely effects of legal and illegal land grabs; rather, they depend on
such relations of rule for their enactment.
45 To understand the institutionalization of land grabbing, in other words, requires
attention to the ways in which relations of rule minoritize, subjugate, and create fear
among selected members of a social formation and how such fear is deployed to
legitimize their subjugation. In some instances, they enable removal, extermination,
looting, burning, eve-teasing, and other forms of violence, or what Appadurai (1998)
perceptively reveals in his discussion as ethnic violence in the era of globalization. The
third point, then, is that while all vulnerable people are potential targets of land
grabbing, only the construction of particular others from whom such grabs can be
legitimated will secure popular support and not spark general unrest. I have also
emphasized the criticality of historically specific relations of dispossession as the basis
for understanding land appropriations and the need to tether forms of rule to the
expropriation of people and communities from their property as well as economic and
social security. Finally, in showcasing these points I have emphasized the criticality of
viewing land grabs as an ongoing process that is reproduced under changing
circumstances, where tensions of property ownership are not claimed once and for all,
but rather, are constituted through continual, if changing, processes of rule and the
creation of difference.

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 The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh 15

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NOTES
1. Under the “Defense of Pakistan Rules” (DPR), the Government of Pakistan passed the Enemy
Property (Custody and Regulation) Order II of 1965 that was reconfirmed as the Enemy Property
Ordinance, 1969 after the Indo-Pakistan war. This was followed by the East Pakistan Rule 161, the
East Pakistan Enemy Property (Lands and Building) Administration and Disposal Order, which
continued after the independence of Bangladesh. While the practice remained the same, the
name formally changed under the Vested and Non-resident Property (Administration) Act (Act
XLVI) of 1974.
2. Included here is theft by private interests and the state’s failure to intervene to protect the
property rights of Hindu citizens.
3. The ‘ungodly secularists’ include the Hindu population who were especially targeted during
the war. While other groups in Bangladesh have been marginalized, particularly the Bihari and
tribal communities, it is Hindu property that is the target of the Vested Property Act and the sole
focus of this paper.
4. See, for example, the contributions of Bonefeld 2001, De Angelis 2001, 2004, Hall 2013, Harvey
2003, Marx 1983, Midnight Notes Collective 2001; and, for a Bangladesh example, see Adnan 2013.
5. Unlike previously, when low-wage non-farm employment was a growing sector, today illegal
and legal seizures are more likely to generate precarious lives and livelihoods with limited
opportunities for work, even at below-subsistence levels. In this context, NGO and other
parastatal institutions have helped the transition to market dependence, a hallmark of
neoliberalism, which is realized through credit/debt schemes and training programs assumed to
help generate income for the rural and increasingly the urban poor.
6. Hall (2013: 1584) supports this claim in noting that ‘only some definitions [of primitive
accumulation and accumulation by dispossession] mention the actors involved (these include
capital, states, state-owned enterprises and non-profit entities)’. Yet in his 2011 work, he too fails
to acknowledge the dispossessed as actors, whether through organized and collective resistance
or as individual or family resource owners.
7. Relations of exclusion are more provocatively explored as relations of inclusion to emphasize
the fact that experiences of exclusion and the protections of state are particular characteristics
of belonging, however unequal. From this perspective, there is no position of social exclusion,
only a lack of rights and access to resources as a condition of unequal inclusion.
8. See, for example, the collection by Vermeulen & Govers (1994), particularly the essays by
Barth, and Verdery (1994) for her focus on political economy.
9. It is impossible to explore these processes of ethnicization and minoritization here. It will
suffice to offer the critical question posed by Appadurai (1996: 41): ‘are we in the midst of a vast

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 The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh 18

worldwide Malthusian correction, which works through the idioms of minoritization and
ethnicization but is functionally geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization,
minus the inconvenient noise of its losers?’
10. The insecurity this created for Hindu citizens during this period of Pakistani rule led to one
of the largest migrations of Pakistani Hindus to West Bengal, India.
11. The Language movement remains significant for Bangladesh’s national narrative and is
celebrated each year on 21 February, Ekushy.
12. Both H.S. Suhrawardy and Mujib-ur-Rahman would be central to the movement for regional
autonomy and, subsequently, to the independence movement.
13. This was followed by The East Bengal Evacuees (Administration of Property) Act (VIII of
1949), The East Bengal Evacuees (Restoration of Possession) Act (XXII of 1951), The East Bengal
Evacuees (Administration of Immovable Property) Act (XXIV of 1951), The East Bengal Prevention
of Transfer of Property and Removal of Documents and Records Act of 1952, and The Pakistan
(Administration of Evacuees Property) Act (XII of 1957). In the context of the Indo-Pakistan War
the following acts were passed: The East Pakistan Disturbed Persons (Rehabilitation) Ordinance
(No 1 of 1964), The Defense of Pakistan Ordinance (No. XXIII of 6 September 1965), The Defense of
Pakistan Rules of 1965, The Enemy Property (Custody and Registration) Order of 1965, The East
Pakistan Enemy Property (Lands and Buildings Administration and Disposal Order of 1966), and
The Enemy Property (Continuance of Emergency Provision) Ordinance No. 1 of 1969.
14. Hindu citizens of East Pakistan did resist some of these initiatives, but others chose to
participate in the Constituent Assembly and work alongside Muslim leaders. Class differences
among Hindus may also have limited mass opposition—many were part of the educated elite and
among university faculty and civil servants, while others were dispersed throughout the country
and among poor farmers and fishers.
15. A great deal has been written on Hindu families who have left East Pakistan/Bangladesh for
West Bengal, but far less has been written about those who chose to remain in their country of
birth.
16. While the Order included the seizure of so-called abandoned property from ethnic Biharis
residing in Bangladesh prior to 1971, Hindus, who were its immediate target, owned the majority
of appropriated land.
17. The Vested Properties Return (Amendment) Bill, 2011, enables Hindus to reclaim their
property taken by the government or by individuals. The 2013 Amendment allows the
government to publish gazettes on new vested properties and identifies two property schedules,
one for land under the district commissioner and the other for land illegally occupied by
individuals.
18. The nine co-organisers include Ain o Salish Kendro, Bangladesh Hindu Buddha Christian
Oikya Parishad (BHBCOP), Nijera Kori, Association for Land Reform and Development (ALRD),
Arpito Sampatti Ain Protirodh Andolon (ASAPA), Bangladesh Puja Udjapon Parishad, Bangladesh
Legal Aid Services Trust (BLAST), Sammilito Samajik Andolon, and Human Development Research
Centre (HDRC).
19. http://www.dhakatribune.com/law-amp-rights/2013/oct/09/js-passes-vested-property-act-
amendment-bill#sthash.CWwrmAXw.dpuf.

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ABSTRACTS
Constructing religious difference as a national security threat, the Vested Property Act, whose
legacy dates from the period of East Pakistan, marks Bangladeshi Hindus as citizens whose
allegiance to the country is always suspect. This paper explores the social production of Hindu
difference through legal claims to the right to private property. I draw on shifting policy reforms
to show how land rights and the control of private property, embedded in historical, social,
political, and cultural relations, shape the security of people and their subjectivity. I argue that
constructions of Hindu identity are marked by particular relations of social inclusion that are
consequential for enacting rights claims in the interests of private accumulation.

INDEX
Keywords: dispossession, land grab, subjection, law, social rights, Bangladesh

AUTHOR
SHELLEY FELDMAN
Binghamton University (USA)

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